Peace Prize Problems vs. Malala

***UPDATE***

The West has embraced Malala for the same reasons it embraced pacifist civil rights activists: IT IS EXPLOITING HER AND PERVERTING HER MESSAGE.

So while I was writing about Malala, I took a quote from her interview with John Stewart—an interview which troubled me because Stewart asked, jokingly, if he could adopt her. It felt colonialist, but I allowed myself to be gaslighted by colonialist, patriarchal society.

Shortly after I posted about Malala, a friend hit the nail on the head in posting a Huffington Post article about Malala and the white messiah complex. A few poignant exerpts:

This is a story of a native girl being saved by the white man. Flown to the UK, the Western world can feel good about itself as they save the native woman from the savage men of her home nation. It is a historic racist narrative that has been institutionalised.
...
The Western savior complex has hijacked Malala's message. The West has killed more girls than the Taliban have. The West has denied more girls an education via their missiles than the Taliban has by their bullets. The West has done more against education around the world than extremists could ever dream of. 

I should've known. Any time a woman of color is enthusiastically embraced for her social justice work by the predominantly white public, I should get suspicious. But I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Baig of HuffPost, and my friend, are both right. There are a thousand Malalas killed by drone strikes, not the Taliban, who didn't survive to tell her story, who didn't get flown out to a Western country to get intensive medical care. They are not pacifist Dr. Kings—they know that sometimes it's the ballot or the bullet (or in this case, women's education or the bullet). I see pacifism and civil disobedience as debatable means of social change simply because the way oppressors seem to love it makes me uneasy. But even if we agree that pacifism good, that does not equal approval of Western protogenocidal military choices.

Truth is, I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion of a Peace Prize administered by westerners. Isn't it just a means to dictate which types of revolutions are okay?

Malala is wonderful, and so are the non-pacifists in her situation, and so are the thousands of kids killed at the hands of the U.S. government.
***

This is just me nominating Malala Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize. They're announcing it tomorrow and she is the definition of an awesome pacifist.

I can't know the other potential nominees for sure because the Nobel people don't disclose, and while other shoe-in candidates (Denis Mukwege is an incredible human being, about whom I read in Eve Ensler's memoir, In the Body of the World) appeal to me, I can't help but empathize with her as a young person passionate about change. Malala was targeted by the Taliban and ultimately shot in the head at the age of 14, just for being an advocate for womens' education and trying to go to school. She made a miraculous recovery and is now a prominent young feminist pacifist advocate for education. Malala represents, to me, an innate goodness and resistance to oppression in the human soul. In her words...

Influential AND fabulous

"If he comes, what will you do, Malala? Then I replied to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said, if you hit a Talib with a shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib—you must not treat others with cruelty and harshness, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education."

So yeah, if Obama and Al Gore can win it, Malala certainly deserves to.